Yesterday, shortly after noon local time in Utah, Christian conservative activist Charlie Kirk won his final debate. During a peaceful disagreement with an audience member about recent mass shootings committed by “transgender” Americans, Kirk’s answer was cut short by an assassin’s bullet tearing through his throat. At this time, the suspect is still at large and therefore speculation about their sex or gender identity would be premature. What is certain, however, is their status as a coward and loser. If someone wants to argue with you and you shoot them, you have lost the argument.
I will not pretend to know what is going on in the mind of his beautiful young wife, or how his two small children will come to process what happened, but I have to imagine that trying to view the event as a win would be, for them, a tough sell. Before any further thoughts on this atrocity, I would like to encourage everyone with a heart to stop what they are doing and pray that God comfort them and help them somehow understand the incomprehensible. Their husband and father wasn’t just mocked, threatened or assaulted, as had happened countless times before. This time, he is dead. They will never see him again in this world.
I have to admit I was never a big fan of Charlie. I agreed with him on most political issues from what I saw of him, but I didn’t follow him on social media. I didn’t watch many of the famous debates he had with college students as he traveled the country. I thought it was mildly amusing when South Park recently portrayed him as a grown man obsessed with yelling at young women about abortion. Charlie did too, apparently, or he was at least a good enough sport about it to change his Twitter profile picture to one of Cartman doing an impression of him. If he had say, died in a car accident, I would have thought, “Oh that’s too bad, what an awful thing to happen to such a young man” and then continued on about my day. Instead I spent the day crying, something I cannot remember ever doing over the death of a stranger. For some reason, the sight of an American man brutally murdered for nothing but sharing his opinion turned me into the man’s greatest supporter. This would be another “accomplishment” of the monster that took his life, I suppose. Charlie Kirk is now more significant and more beloved and more respected than ever.
There is a historical parallel in this regard to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. In killing Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth both elevated the man’s iconic status in American history and did horrible damage to his own pro-Southern cause. Republicans that filled the power vacuum after the President’s death were not only less reasonable people than Lincoln to begin with, but were now filled with a justifiable sense of righteous anger, and the South suffered greatly for it in the decades that followed. Like Booth, modern American leftists are in an irrational tantrum about losing a war. In this case it is a culture war rather than a shooting war, but it is just as certainly over, and they have just as certainly lost. How painful their loss ends up being will depend on how fast they can get over it and stop lashing out violently, and how quickly the right feels they can forgive them for the callous destruction of life they have already caused.
The pace of this forgiveness is no doubt slowed by many of Kirk’s political opponents deciding that his death is something to celebrate. Some have done so directly, others have chosen to employ passive-aggressive victim-blaming. A good rule of thumb is that if you feel the need to add the word *but* after you claim to be against the murder of someone for peacefully expressing their political view, you would probably be better off not speaking at all. In fact, you would probably be better off not living in a free society at all. Perhaps consider emigration to Iran or North Korea, if they will have you. You will fit in better among your fellow haters of free expression. All Charlie Kirk ever did was talk to you, and you were too petty and childish and pathetic to handle that, so you killed him.
If your disgust with these people is causing thoughts of revenge to enter your mind you are not alone, but take a step back and remember Paul’s words to Christians in the midst of the battle against evil. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” While Charlie Kirk was killed by a human being, and his death is being celebrated by human beings, it is Satan that orchestrates their actions. Our war is not with these people but with their master. Always remember that no person is beyond love or redemption, as we see from the example of Paul himself who was a terrorizer and murderer of Christians before his conversion.
It has always been, perhaps morbidly, a fascination of mine to consider what goes through a person’s mind when death is truly imminent. As it has been nearly 2,000 years since anyone has experienced death and come back to talk about it, it is hard to say. Many who have had near-death experiences talk about time slowing down, the cliche of your “life flashing before your eyes”. If this is true Charlie had quite a life to think about in those few moments between the bullet hitting him and his loss of Earthly consciousness. Perhaps he thought about his loving family or the great work he had accomplished in his professional career. Possibly there was excitement at the thought of his meeting with Jesus Christ being so near. But a small part of me smiles a bit that he may have had time to briefly consider his final victory. He had actually “owned a lib” so hard that they were unable to continue the argument and felt the need to resort to murder. He is now with Almighty God, so we will not be able to ask him until we leave this mortal realm ourselves. Our duty is to continue his work and speak truth to the evil in our culture so that we will similarly be hated demons, and rewarded by our Creator when our time comes.
America's Second Chance 